Psychology assistant professor Martie G. Haselton talks about one of the strangest results of studying dating – that you should maybe date less, not more, to find your perfect mate.

Q: Researchers found that the optimum proportion of possible mates at a party is 9 percent. Does that mean that women should stop looking and decide on The One after nine dates out of 100 in their lifetime?

Haselton:Well, so that’s 9 percent.

Let’s say that you decide that you need to find a mate who is also a reporter and there’s only a possible 100 who fall within your category and are potentially of interest and you had to choose and you could not go back.

So you are sort of moving sequentially through a set of mates.

This is just a statistical truth that if you examined more than nine out of that 100 before setting your aspirations then that increases the chances that you will actually pass the best person.

Q: Awesome.

The fundamental thing is that if you search indefinitely, you will pass the best person by. People experience this as sort of a feeling, some people might call it settling, but other people sort of feel like it snaps into place, that you sort of know The One. Sort of like your grandmother told you. I wouldn’t lose hope because there are billions of people on this planet. I think the best strategy for women is to increase the number of people they are exposed to. It’s a numbers game. So maybe don’t hang out at the same places that you always hang out at with the same group of friends. You’ve searched that mate space.